life after the ashes: the postwar pain, and resilience, of young

UNITED STATES HOLOCAUST MEMORIAL MUSEUM CENTER FOR ADVANCED HOLOCAUST STUDIES

Life After the Ashes The Postwar Pain, and Resilience,

of Young Holocaust Survivors

Peter Suedfeld

W A S H I N G T O N , D. C.

Life After the Ashes The Postwar Pain, and Resilience,

of Young Holocaust Survivors

Peter Suedfeld

MONNA AND OTTO WEINMANN LECTURE SERIES 15 MAY 2002

The assertions, opinions, and conclusions in this occasional paper are those of the author. They do not necessarily reflect those of the United States Holocaust Memorial Council or of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.

First printing, August 2002

Copyright © 2002 by Peter Suedfe ld, assigned to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum

THE MONNA AND OTTO WEINMANN ANNUAL LECTURE focuses on Holocaust survivors

who came to America, and on their families. Born in Poland and raised in Austria, Monna Steinbach Weinmann (1906–1991) fled to England from Vienna in the autumn of 1938. Otto Weinmann (1903–1993) was born in Vienna and raised in Czechoslovakia. He served in the Czech, French, and British armies, was injured in the D-Day invasion at Normandy, and received the Croix de Guerre for his valiant contributions during the war. Monna Steinbach and Otto Weinmann married in London in 1941 and immigrated to the United States in 1948. Funding for this program is made possible by a generous grant from their daughter Janice Weinman Shorenstein. The Monna and Otto Weinmann Annual Lecture is organized by the Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.

In the mid-1980s, Robert Krell, my good friend and the 1997 Monna and Otto

Weinmann lecturer, convinced me that I actually am a Holocaust survivor despite not having

been in a concentration camp. I had avoided that fate by being taken in 1944 into a Red Cross

orphanage in Budapest, with false Christian papers, accelerated instruction on how to behave

during a Catholic mass, and exhortations never to reveal my name, background, or other signs

of being Jewish.

Having been convinced, in 1991 I attended the first international gathering of child

survivors in New York City (see Marks, 1993). Much to my surprise, there I met an old friend

and fellow social psychologist, Ervin Staub. It turned out that he, too, was a child survivor from

Budapest. During my professional career I had read many articles about Holocaust survivors,

and I had been imbued with the general consensus that the overwhelming majority were

irreparably scarred by their experiences: unable to pursue successful occupations, unable to

have close emotional relationships, and deeply neurotic if not borderline psychotic.

I knew that I refuted this prognosis; but Rob and Ervin were also child survivors and

had become well-known behavioral scientists. Each of us held a full professorship at a major

North American university, had a normally happy family life, and—as far as I could tell—was

in good mental health. Adapting and oversimplifying Sir Karl Popper’s reasoning about black

swans and white swans (1934/1959), I could argue that it takes only one healthy, successful

2 • LIFE AFTER THE ASHES

survivor to disconfirm the theory that all survivors are devastated beyond repair; and now I had

three such disconfirmations. I also noticed that much of the literature was based on clinical

interviews and other anecdotal research, a method well-known to be susceptible to various

biases and research artifacts (e.g., Helmreich, 1992; Suedfeld, 1996a).

THE RESEARCH PROJECT

My scientific roots are in experimental psychology, and I rely on data that are systematically

collected and statistically analyzed. So I began to collect objective, quantitative data on both

child and adult survivors of the Holocaust. During the past ten years, my research group has

conducted a number of studies based on videotaped oral histories and written self-report

measures, thus using both qualitative and quantitative material but basically numerical methods

to understand the material. Let me briefly summarize our research methodology. Our data come

from videotaped oral history archives in Vancouver and in Columbus, Ohio; from

questionnaires administered at five gatherings of survivors and their families, and from a non-

Holocaust survivor comparison group. The videotapes were analyzed by a variety of

quantitative content analytic systems, and the questionnaires were scored according to standard

instructions. Both kinds of data were then processed through statistical analyses. We break

down the data as follows:

Survivors

1. “Identified” vs. “hidden” survivors: “Identified” means that during the time of the

persecution the authorities had identified them as Jews and they were either in camps, slave

labor programs, or ghettos. “Hidden” survivors were either physically concealed—in rooms, as

was Anne Frank, or in forests, underground bunkers, sewers, and other such places—or in

“open hiding,” not physically concealed but hiding their Jewish identity. Many had false papers

identifying them as Christian. A high proportion were children passing as non-Jews and

sheltered by Christian families, monasteries, convents, orphanages, and other kinds of group

homes.

2. Child vs. older: People who were fifteen years or younger at the end of the war were

categorized as child survivors.

3. Time period (videotaped interviews only): The “before” period was prior to when

the war affected the country in which the survivor lived; the “early” Holocaust was from when

the Nazis first occupied or dominated the country where the survivor lived, up to the point

where the interviewee was removed from home. This usually meant being deported to a camp,

Peter Suedfeld • 3

moved into a ghetto, or going into hiding. The “late” Holocaust period was from removal from

home until liberation. “After” was post-liberation to the time of the interview.

Comparison Group

Members of the comparison or control group were Jewish volunteers, in the same age

range as the survivors. These volunteers had lived in North America or other safe places before

1945, and they were living in North America at the time of the data collection. Control-group

members filled out our paper and pencil measures only. The individuals were recruited through

Jewish organizations in Vancouver, Miami Beach, and Columbus.

LIGHT FROM THE ASHES

In 1996, the International Society of Political Psychology held its annual conference in

Vancouver, the city that has been my home for thirty years. As part of my contribution to that

meeting, I organized a symposium to consider how a particular set of childhood experiences

affected the later life of an individual (Suedfeld, 1996b). Because I knew that several of the

members of the Society had either survived or fled from the Holocaust, I wanted my colleagues

to reconsider the widespread assumption that early trauma causes irreparable psychic damage.

Given that the potential speakers had grown up to be respected social scientists, it was clear that

even the most massive and widespread traumatic event of our time had not destroyed their

lives; but that outcome left unanswered the questions of what effects the Holocaust did have on

them and, more broadly, on other child survivors.

Through Ervin Staub and others, I found several more colleagues who fit the criteria.

Several turned me down: they didn’t want to think about those unhappy times, or they didn’t

want to reveal themselves so personally and painfully at an open forum. I was disappointed, but

eventually recruited four participants. I intended only to organize and chair the session,

introduce the speakers, and maintain an orderly discussion period. I am one of the many

survivors who were, and in many cases still are, reluctant to talk about their experiences even to

their families and certainly in public.

Much to my surprise and dismay, both the speakers and the audience insisted that I

become an active participant and tell my own story. This gave me a much more sympathetic

fellow feeling for the people who had declined my invitation. But, in all honor, I could not

refuse what I had urged others to do, so we wound up with five speakers.

The session was crammed with people who had come to hear the life stories of

colleagues and friends they had known and respected, personally or through their publications,


for many years. It was the first time I had ever seen tears from audience members at a scientific

symposium. Several were so moved as they learned about the horrors through which some of

the participants had lived, and as the audience felt the painful forthrightness with which those

events, and their consequences, were presented. We were all reminded that, although two-thirds

of Europe’s Jews died during the Holocaust, the speakers were drawn from the fewer than ten

percent of children who had survived.

At the end of the session, and during the rest of the meeting, people kept coming up,

thanking me, and persuading me to follow up the symposium with something more lasting.

These suggestions eventually led to the publication of the book, Light from the Ashes: Social

Science Careers of Young Holocaust Refugees and Survivors (Suedfeld, 2001).

The book contains autobiographical chapters by seventeen people whose early life was

disrupted by Nazi persecution. Six Jewish youngsters spent the entire war in German-

dominated countries, as did one Christian child whose father eventually died in a concentration

camp because he was a prominent opponent of the Nazis. Ten others, including one from

another anti-Nazi Christian family, became refugees. All eventually emigrated from Europe and

pursued research careers in the humanities or social sciences.

I asked each author to describe his or her childhood and youth, and to trace the

influence of those experiences to who and what the person became: professionally, personally,

and societally. I deliberately invited people whose research was not focused on the Holocaust,

and the majority were like me: they had never thought about how the Holocaust might have

affected their eventual choice of discipline, research topics, and theoretical and methodological

approaches. Some had done their best to avoid thinking about their Holocaust experiences—

and some of the people I invited declined because they preferred to continue avoiding such

thoughts.

The lives of the contributors, before, during, and after the war, are impressive in their

diversity. Whether they survived by pretending to be Christians, or lived in hiding with

relatives or foster families, or fled to strange foreign lands—Britain, America, Australia and, in

one case, China—and no matter where and in what field they wound up, they were able to

discover connections between those early events and their adult self. In retrospect, their

(actually, I suppose I should say “our”) values, personality, emotions, politics, close

relationships, and scientific work were seen as connected organically to the children we had

been. All of us lost family and home early in life; some of us lost even our identity. We

survived a varied range of dangers and privations , and had to rebuild our life in a new country,

a new culture, a new language, and often with new people.


In contemplating the book to which we all contributed, I think about it in the context of

my broader research on survivors of the Holocaust. In what follows, I shall use some of the

chapters in Light from the Ashes to illustrate the findings of the wider-scale research project.

One striking finding has been that many of my interviewees considered the years after

the war to be as traumatic as the Holocaust itself, and sometimes more so. Some, separated

from their family, feared never to see them again—a fear that only too often was confirmed.

Having lived through the siege of Budapest in a Red Cross orphanage, I was terrified after

liberation that I would be lost forever. I was passing as Christian, under a false name unknown

to my family, and my current orphanage was only the latest in a series of bombed-out shelters,

far from the original address where they had left me. Thus, even if my relatives had survived, I

was convinced that they could never find me; increasingly convinced as the months rolled by

and other children were reunited with their families. Unlike so many of my cohort, I was lucky:

an aunt and uncle, following a list of all Red Cross children’s shelters in Budapest, did

eventually stumble on the right one.

Although my mother did not return from Auschwitz, my father survived forced labor

and a concentration camp, and came back to take me to America. For those children who were

left alone, the adjustment to years in an orphanage, or to foster families who were not always

welcoming, could be worse than life during the war. Some of these children found loving,

warm foster parents and siblings; but others were abused, neglected, and rejected, sometimes

shunted from one family or one orphanage to another until they grew up. One of our

interviewees, orphaned during the Holocaust, was the subject of a postwar custody battle

between his Christian foster parents and his dead father’s sister. The latter won the fight, and

then put him in a Jewish orphanage. She didn’t want him; she only wanted to make sure he’d be

brought up Jewish. Another, a young teenager at liberation, was placed with relatives who felt

that he was forced on them. Although his inte lligence was, if anything, superior, they managed

to get rid of him by committing him to a home for the mentally disabled, where he was kept

until he was old enough to go out on his own. Several felt safer with their Christian rescuers

than with parents returning from concentration camps, and resisted integration into a family and

religion that meant nothing but danger.

The process of emigrating to the eventual place of settlement could be long and hard,

as people waited for visas, passports, affidavits of support, and other forms of help. Sometimes,

this process took place in Nazi-indoctrinated communities among whom it was still dangerous

to be a Jew. Hadassa Black-Gutman, one of the contributors to Light from the Ashes, wandered

from Ukraine to Poland to Czechoslovakia to Germany to Australia, a journey that took five


years and occasioned three name changes, learning three new languages, and persecution by

antisemitic teachers and children all along the way. René Goldman, another contributor, was

orphaned in France and indoctrinated in a Communist orphanage. Thus indoctrinated, he

migrated to his parents’ original home, Poland, before studying in China and ending up as a

Canadian Sinologist.

My father and I spent three years in Vienna waiting for a visa to the United States. He

put me into an expensive boarding school, which he could afford because he was working for

the U.S. Army and had access to dollars, food, and Army surplus clothing. What he did not

realize was that the only Viennese who could afford to send their children there were those who

had done well under the Nazi regime. Having relaxed my vigilance with the end of the war, I

was soon discovered to be Jewish by my antisemitic schoolmates, and spent the next year or so

in one fight after another.

Even arrival in a more tolerant country had its difficulties. Learning still another

language was less of a problem for most than becoming familiar with the nuances and

unspoken assumptions of the culture. I remember laughing when a classmate claimed to be

related to Roy Rogers—I knew that Roy Rogers was a fictional character in the movies. I

laughed when another child said she was part American Indian—I knew that when a people

were defeated, they were exterminated, and that therefore there could be no Indians, even part

Indians, left alive. In turn, my class laughed at me when I had my first turn at bat and then

didn’t know which way to run the bases, or when I automatically kicked at a ball instead of

hitting it over a net. Eric Klinger, another contributor to the book, went from soccer in Austria

to cricket and field hockey in Australia to baseball, basketball, and football in the U.S., all

between the ages of six and ten.

THE FINDINGS

I will discuss the contributions to the book, as well as some of our research findings, under four

major headings: long-term reactions to the Holocaust, personal relationships, work, and adult

personality.

Long-term Reactions to the Holocaust

Working with child survivors, and being one, poses an interesting paradox. Much of

the material that concerns us as researchers and research subjects, or as autobiographers, relates

to the distant past, our early youth; but we are now in our late middle age, in our 60s or 70s.


Thus, in dealing with the Holocaust, our childhood recaptures our mind; in dealing with our

present, we confront the limited span of years still to come.

How do we look back on our childhood, more than fifty years after the end of the war?

Robert Krell has pointed out that after the war, the sufferings of children caught up in

the Holocaust were often dismissed not only by other children but by adults, frequently

including their own parents. They were told that their experiences in ghettos or in hiding could

not have been as bad as those of concentration camp survivors; besides, children can’t really

remember things clearly; and even if they did, they would forget them soon enough. Many of

our interviewees have said that this disdain, and the silence it enforced, were among the most

difficult emotional problems they experienced after the war (Krell, 1997).

With the passage of time, many of these problems have eased. We have become more

comfortable with our new language, culture, and compatriots; many of us, although by no

means all, have become less stressed by our memories or even by talking about them. As we

approach and enter old age, however, we find ourselves thinking more about the past, often a

painful process. The mature reinterpretation of things that happened long ago can lead to

forgiveness and peace; but it can also lead to the realization that some things we accepted as

inevitable, or for our own good, were neither.

With advancing age, retirement, and the emptying of the home nest, more child

survivors have begun to participate in survivor gatherings and organizations, written their

autobiographies, and agreed to be interviewed for oral history archives. For our research

subjects and the contributors to the book, doing the interview, writing the chapter, or filling out

the questionnaires often initiated a process of greater openness to their own memories and

emotions, as well as to communication with other people

Thinking about the Holocaust

Survivors are thinking more about the Holocaust than they have allowed themselves to

do for five decades, but, perhaps inescapably, most still find it incomprehensible (Table 1).


Table 1. Thinking About the Holocaust

Category Child Survivors Controls Adult Survivors

• Influences my present life 12.81 10.46 12.00

• Intrusive thoughts about it 7.46 5.12 7.44

• Have tried to make sense of 2.76 2.72 2.94

why it happened

• Think I know why it happened 2.33 1.77 2.46

(Mean times mentioned)

Many survivors, however, have some clear ideas about what enabled them to survive.

They recall dealing with problems in a rational practical way, rather than by denial or other

palliative strategies (Suedfeld, Fell, & Krell, 1998; see Figure 1).

Fig. 1. Coping Strategies

Control subjects, trying to explain why some people survived the Holocaust while

others did not, tend to attribute it to the personal qualities of the survivors, such as

psychological strength. Survivors themselves, while recognizing the importance of such

qualities, are much more likely also to cite external factors in their environment. Child

survivors especially acknowledge the help of other people. This seems obvious: very few

children could survive even in a normal, peaceful environment, without such help (Table 2).

0 2 4 6 8

10 12 14 16 18 20

Before Early Late After Time Period

Mea

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Emotion-Oriented Problem-Oriented Religion/Chance


Table 2. Factors in Survival1

Category Child Survivors Controls Adult Survivors • Social Support From… Ø Family 44 10 28 Ø Friends 5 0 10 Ø Gentiles 36 0 8

• Being Secretive 6 3 5 • Being Careful 6 0 8 • Fate/Luck/Chance 49 26 50 • Aryan Appearance 10 0 3 • Hope/Persistence/Determination 9 19 25 • Courage/Patience 5 10 3 • Good Health 4 7 3 • Psychological Strength 3 13 3

• General Internal Factors 24 35 60 • General External Factors 96 68 78

(Percent mentioned)

But it also seems that this help was given, or arranged, at the initiative of others: As Figure 2

shows, asking for help is not highly ranked in how child survivors coped with problems during

the Holocaust, nor since then (see also Suedfeld et al., 1997).

Fig. 2. Seeking Social Support

1 Survivors were asked: “What factors were important in your surviving the Holocaust?” Comparison subjects were asked: “What factors were important in whether or not a person survived the Holocaust?”

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Child Survivors Adult Survivors


Personal Relationships

Throughout this paper, I occasionally refer to the sequence of psychosocial crises

described by psychologist Erik Erikson (1950, 1959, 1975, 1982). He viewed such crises or

conflicts as occurring throughout the life span, each marking an important transition and each

having either a favorable resolution that contributes to further psychosocial growth and

development, or an unfavorable one that hampers such growth. Our research treated the crises

as important conflicts regardless of their chronological or sequential appearance in the taped

interviews (Suedfeld et al., 2002).

One of these crises is trust versus mistrust toward other people (Figure 3). During the

war, Jewish children and those whose families dissented from Nazi politics learned that other

people, especially adults, were dangerously unpredictable. Parents disappeared, leaving them

among strangers. Strangers could change from being helpful to being deadly enemies, for

reasons the child could not understand; or, as many of our interviews showed, an antisemitic

murderer could for some unfathomable reason become the protector of one particular Jewish

child. Even the country upon which they had bestowed their first patriotic loyalty threatened

them. For example, Karl Butzer, one of the political refugees who contributed to the book, fled

with his family to Britain in 1937. Describing the German bombing of England, he wrote:

“[The German] planes with the undulating engine noise were my people. But if they won and

‘got’ us, my people would hurt us. So I hoped the raspy British engines would win” (Butzer,

2001, p. 374). I remember having a similar psychological conflict during the Allied bombing of

Budapest.

Fig. 3. Eriksonian Crisis: Trust vs. Mistrust

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Without exhibiting the paranoia and antisocial personality patterns predicted by some

experts, child survivors have grown up independent, self-reliant, and wary. Many share a

generalized skepticism about other people. As a logical corollary of mistrust, child survivors

tend to have little faith in the benevolence of people, or the world in general—even less than do

adult survivors (Figure 4).

Fig. 4. Benevolence of People and the World

At the same time, they have very strong attachments to their own family and social

circle. Their responses in regard to Erikson’s conflict between intimacy and isolation are shown

in Figure 5.

Fig. 5. Eriksonian Crisis: Intimacy vs. Isolation

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Neutral Point

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Intimacy Isolation



Child survivors overwhelmingly feel intimately connected with others. Almost every

chapter in Light from the Ashes, and almost every videotaped interview, emphasizes the

importance of love, affection, support, and caring among the survivor’s childhood family and

friends, as well as between the survivor as an adult and his or her spouse, surviving parents,

uncles and aunts, children, grandchildren, friends, and colleagues. This reaction is not

undiscriminating: child survivors also describe unhappy relationships and encounters with

xenophobes and antisemites, but they describe their relationships in mostly positive tones. The

survivors also consider themselves to be good and loving parents—although their children

sometimes feel intimidated by the parents’ mysterious and frightening past, insistence on

educational achievement, and dedication to their own work.

Work

Work, of course, is another major aspect of everyday life, and one where child

survivors were expected to find serious difficulty. The people in Light from the Ashes are all

successful researchers with doctorates, most of them with impressive lists of publications,

awards, and appointments. They are obviously drawn from a narrow segment of child survivors

in terms of their work history. What does a broader picture look like?

The devotion of child survivors to becoming educated was an important part of their

success. Upon emigrating, most were put into school grades below the norm for their age

because they spoke little or no English. Some, who stopped in several countries before finding

a final refuge, went through this experience repeatedly. Yet, most caught up: one of our

interviewees completed eleven grades in three years. Jack Lomranz, whose chapter in the book

is entitled “A Wandering Jew as a Social Scientist,” went to school in Germany, China, Israel,

and the U.S., getting his bachelor’s degree at night while supporting his survivor mother and

his own wife and child. In fact, despite financial and linguistic hardships, the proportion of

child survivors who earned at least one college degree was about as high as among North

American-born comparison subjects, and much higher than the population norm (Suedfeld,

Paterson, & Krell, 2002; Table 3).


Table 3. Educational Achievement

Level Child Survivors Controls USA Population Norm

Finished Elementary 3 NA 11

Finished Secondary 14 8 38

Gymnasium 3 NA NA

Trade/Technical School 11 3 NA

Some University 11 22 17

Undergraduate Degree 19 30

Graduate Degree 41 38

(Percent of people responding)

Just as education was of great importance in their childhood and adolescence, so during

adulthood, work formed an important component of their identity and a source of self-esteem.

The relevant Eriksonian conflict (industry vs. inferiority) (Figure 6) shows their emphasis on

devotion to work.

Fig. 6. Eriksonian Crisis: Industry vs. Inferiority

On average, child survivors pursued occupations that were less prestigious than those

of the control subjects. Still, the child survivors’ status on an international scale of occupational

prestige (Ganzeboom and Treiman, 1996) was at the level equivalent to “software engineer;

computer programmer; engaged in business activities”: solidly in the middle to upper-middle

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{ 19


class, not a negligible achievement for people whose past was so disrupted and whose future

had been predicted to be so bleak (Figure 7).

Fig. 7. Occupational Status

Most of the interviewed child survivors were not very interested in the convenience or

monetary rewards of their occupation. Their most valued job characteristics were: interesting

work, using their skills and talents, helpful/friendly co-workers, helping other people, and being

useful to society. Note that all but one of these—friendly co-workers—deal with intrinsic rather

than extrinsic values (Figure 8).

Fig. 8. Work Values

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Occupational Status

Child Survivor Child Control Adult Survivor

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Interesting work

Using skills & talents

Helpful/friendly coworkers

Helping others

Useful to society

Good pay

Convenient hours

High social status

Child Survivors


So far I have been talking about group averages. But we also found that, within

particular occupations, many individual survivors were quite successful. The eminence that

some have reached in their chosen professions is impressive, and is distributed across a variety

of life pursuits. Many young survivors eventually accomplished extraordinary achievements.

Just a short list of those who have name-recognition in North America includes eminent authors

(Nobel laureate Elie Wiesel and Primo Levi), scientists (Roald Hoffmann, Nobel laureate for

chemistry), businessmen and entrepreneurs (George Soros and Jack Tramiel), soldiers (Maj.

Gen. Sidney Shachnow, U.S. Army, Retired), statesmen (Representative Tom Lantos),

filmmakers (Roman Polanski), and clergy (Israel Meir Lau, the Ashkenazic Chief Rabbi of

Israel, and Jean-Marie Cardinal Lustiger, the Cardinal Archbishop of Paris).

Personality and Mental Health

How have child survivors adapted in the fifty-plus years since the war? One

inescapable conclusion, based on the evidence, is that we are not the psychologically and

socially crippled group that some people, including many mental health professionals, expected

us to be.

During the war, Jewish children learned about rejection, denigration, fear, and anxiety;

about the physical traumas of injury, hunger, cold, and exhaustion; and, perhaps most intensely,

about being separated from their parents and placed with adults who were unknown and

unpredictable. Younger children, who did not understand what was going on, felt that their

parents had abandoned them. Many of our interviewees mentioned informers—not only known

antisemites but also nuns, family friends, and even fellow Jews—who gave them up to the

Nazis. As I have already mentioned, their experiences after the war were no more reassuring

about the wisdom of depending on other people.

What do child survivors value? Self-direction—autonomy, independence—is a primary

value that appears in both the interview tapes and the chapters of Light from the Ashes, with

security close behind (Table 4). The contributors to the book greatly value achievement, and

place notably higher value than the average interviewee on stimulation and universalism, which

refers to “understanding, appreciation, tolerance, and protection for the welfare of all people

and for nature” (Schwartz, 1992, p. 12; emphasis in original).


Table 4. Personal Values

Value Light from the Ashes Interviews

Achievement 48 32

Stimulation 25 12

Self-Direction 47 34

Universalism 34 11

Benevolence 20 21

Security 34 34

Spirituality 29 27

(Mentioned by percent)

Child survivors are aware that the world is neither fair nor predictable (see Figure 9);

but although their satisfaction with their life is, on average, lower than the satisfaction reported

by adult survivors and by controls, it is still well on the positive side of neutral. There is one

exception: to no one’s surprise, child survivors agree that they wish they could change some

aspects of their life (Figure 10).

Fig. 9. Fairness and Predictability of Life

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Life is not fair Life is fair Life isunpredictable

No effect/Didn'tanswer



Fig. 10. Satisfaction with Life

None of the groups shows much consensus on expectations from life (Table 5), but the

child survivors’ emphasis on self-reliance differs substantially from that of other groups.

Table 5. Expectations from Life

Expectation Child Survivors Controls Adult Survivors

You must be self-reliant 9 1 1

Expect the worst 5 5 4

Expect goodness 1 0 1

Don’t expect anything 4 0 3

Expect less than you put in 4 1 1

No effect/Didn’t answer 33 14 11

(Mean times mentioned)

What do they believe in? Well, it isn’t religion. Figure 1 illustrated that their accounts

of coping during the Holocaust did show an increase in reliance on supernatural protection. But

that diminished after the war. In the long run, the religious beliefs of most were weakened, if

not destroyed, by their experiences (Figure 11).

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Life close toideal

Lifeconditions

areexcellent

Satisfiedwith my life

I have theimportant

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Wouldn'tchangeanything

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Neutral Point


Fig. 11. Changes in Religious Beliefs

They do not seem to have a very high opinion of themselves: their self-worth is lower

than that of adult survivors and the control group. In view of their success in adapting to a

series of challenging circumstances and building solid families and careers, this finding was

one of our major surprises (Figure 12).

Fig. 12. Self-Worth

One long-term after-effect of their experiences is a heightened aversion to the emotion

of anxiety (Figure 13). Perhaps anxiety was so acute and long-lasting in their childhood as to

make it even more unpleasant than it is for most people; in any case, they try to avoid both its

psychological and physiological signs.

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Became morereligious

Gave up onreligion

No effect/Didn'tanswer


3.8

4

4.2

4.4

4.6

4.8

5

5.2

Mea

n S

core

Self-Worth



Fig. 13. Anxiety Sensitivity

What about the infamous post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), which according to

popular myth afflicts all trauma survivors? The symptoms that make up this psychiatric

diagnostic category include, among other problems: repeated intrusive memories of the

traumatic events, nightmares and other sleep problems, flashbacks, repressed memories,

emotional constriction, outbursts of anger, and difficulty in concentrating. The data (Table 6)

refute previous assumptions about post-traumatic stress. Forty percent of the interviewees

report no symptoms at all, 30% report one, and for two or more symptoms the frequency of

report drops to 0–10%. In essence, the full-blown psychiatric PTSD syndrome is absent. The

most frequently mentioned symptoms, mentioned by fewer than one-third of the respondents,

are hardly signs of serious maladjustment. They are: distress at reminders of the Holocaust and

avoidance of thoughts, feelings, and conversations related to it.

Table 6. Post-Traumatic Stress Symptoms

Number of Symptoms Percent of Survivors

0 40%

1 30%

2 10%

3 10%

4 10%

5 0%

6 0%

0

0.5

1

1.5

2

2.5

3

Mea

n S

core

Fear of the consequences of anxiety Fear of the physical sensations ofanxiety



This is not because the child survivors are unwilling to admit that they have problems.

In fact, quite a few of them acknowledge getting psychological help, for example from

vocational or marital counselors. They are less given to litigation; and having survived so

much, they may feel themselves invulnerable to disease and seldom consult doctors or

pharmacists (Table 7).

Table 7. Seeking Professional Help

Help Received Child Survivors Controls Adult Survivors

Educational Help 16 27 0

Legal Help 19 60 4

Medical Help 19 84 35

Religious Help 8 22 0

Pharmaceutical Help 3 32 4

Psychological Help 35 27 22 (Mentioned by percent)

I have referred to the fact that even the youngest survivors of the Holocaust are now

approaching old age. On the whole, they seem to be facing it with serenity. Erikson’s next crisis

opposes generativity—a concern for future generations—to self-absorption. Our chapter

contributors and our research participants feel great concern for future generations, rather than

being focused on their own problems and future (Figure 14). This concern extends far beyond

their own families, and is perhaps most clearly characterized by the driving urge to prevent

others from suffering as the survivor did. Many survivors are active in Holocaust education in

the schools, as well as in a spectrum of other volunteer activities.

Fig. 14. Eriksonian Crisis: Generativity vs. Self-Absorption

0

0.5

1

1.5

2

2.5

3

Tim

es m

entio

ned

Generativity Self-Absorption



The research areas of the contributors to Light from the Ashes reflect these concerns.

They are heavily weighted toward three topics. One is understanding and helping children at

risk, ethnic minorities, and a variety of vulnerable groups. These groups have included street

children in Europe, North Africa, and the U.S.; women with unwanted pregnancies and their

unwanted children; and aboriginal and immigrant children in Australia, among others. Another

major topic is analyses of and interventions for people who had to deal with emergencies and

disasters, or who experienced traumatic stress in combat, in terrorist activities, or in organized

persecutions. The third topic of concern is the general area of intergroup violence, conflict, and

reconciliation, from the first contacts between Europeans and indigenous Americans through

the wars and quasi-wars of the twentieth century.

The last major psychosocial conflict, according to Erik Erikson, is how one looks back

on one's life as its end approaches. Erikson poses the choices as integrity versus despair: the

perception of one’s life as a worthwhile, integrated whole, rather than as meaningless and

disconnected. In spite of the upheavals and dislocations of their early years, the child survivors

in our research, almost without exception, find that their life has been comprehensible,

meaningful, and satisfying (Figure 15).

Fig. 15. Eriksonian Crisis: Integrity vs. Despair

Conclusions

Both our research data and the chapters in Light from the Ashes come primarily from

child survivors whose physical and mental health is sufficiently good that they lived until at

least the 1980s and were willing and able to write a chapter, to be interviewed, or to attend a

gathering. By definition, we could not collect information from those survivors who were

severely and permanently psychologically crippled, nor from those who died earlier, from

whatever causes.

0

0.1

0.2

0.3

0.4

0.5

0.6

0.7

Tim

es m

entio

ned

Integrity Despair



On the whole, the child survivors included in our study are doing pretty well, although

they do have a skeptical view of the benevolence and trustworthiness of other people. They are

independent-minded; their problem-solving approaches are rational and problem-oriented

(Suedfeld et al., 1997, 1998). Their educational and occupational achievements are impressive,

especially considering all of the disruptions they had to overcome. What they value most about

work is its intrinsic satisfaction, not its material rewards or prestige (Suedfeld et al., 2002).

The child survivors’ family lives are generally positive, and I would guess probably no

worse than any other group of people living in the same culture and the same places. The

expectation that child survivors would be predominantly or universally maladjusted is simply

wrong. Their mental health seems generally good: although they have a few problems, such as

lower self-esteem, they suffer from few if any of the symptoms of post-traumatic stress

disorder. Now in their 60s and 70s, they view their life with contentment and acceptance.

In contrast to the early pessimistic predictions about the future of child survivors, we

now know that many, perhaps most, have overcome the most severe effects of trauma and have

been leading essentially normal lives. What Hemmendinger and Krell (2000, p. 177) recently

wrote about children who survived Buchenwald applies to the entire cohort: “Who could have

thought on April 11, 1945, that any child of that barely living remnant, representing so many

murdered children, would succeed against such overwhelming odds to live a productive and

meaningful life? Not the experts.”

It is perhaps unfair to blame the experts. No psychologist or psychiatrist had ever

before faced patients who had gone through such well-organized, relentless, and multi-faceted

persecution, and there was no foundation of previous experience upon which to base

predictions. Based on what was known in 1945 and 1946, and the parlous state of the recently

liberated survivors, the prognoses were reasonable. Therapists and social scientists then, and—

with much less justification—many of their successors even to this day, focused on the

unprecedented horrors experienced by the survivors of the Holocaust. They also saw the

emotional reactions that may have aided in survival, and interpreted them as symptoms of

psychiatric disturbance rather than as what they were: adaptations to bizarre conditions, which

would not necessarily persist once those conditions disappeared. The experts did not realize,

and some still do not fully appreciate, the resilience and hardiness of the human spirit that has

enabled survivors to live through and recover from those horrors (see Suedfeld, 1997).


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Acknowledgments

This work could not have been conducted without the participation of many survivors,

to whom I am very grateful; nor without the help of colleagues, students, and research

assistants, especially Dr. Robert Krell, Charlene Fell, Helen Paterson, and Tara Weiszbeck. In

connection with the publication of Light from the Ashes, I thank the contributors and our editor,

Ellen McCarthy.

The research has been funded by grants from the Social Sciences and Humanities

Research Council of Canada, the Hampton Fund and the Peter Wall Institute for Advanced

Studies of the University of British Columbia, and the Mershon Center of the Ohio State

University. Organizational support has been provided by those two universities, the Vancouver

Holocaust Centre, and the Columbus (OH) Jewish Historical Society.

Both of my chapters in the book and this paper benefited immensely from the

comments of several friendly critics, especially Dr. Phyllis J. Johnson, on a series of drafts.

PETER SUEDFELD is Dean Emeritus of Graduate Studies and Professor Emeritus of

Psychology at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver. He is a Fellow of the Royal

Society of Canada and of the New York Academy of Sciences. Dr. Suedfeld was born in

Budapest to a Hungarian-Jewish family of writers, scholars, and musicians. When the German

Army entered Budapest in March 1944, he survived in hiding as a Christian child until the city

was liberated by Soviet troops in early 1945. He emigrated to the United States in 1948,

arriving in New York at age 13. He subsequently served three years in the U.S. Army before

receiving his bachelor’s degree from Queens College. His master’s and doctorate (1963) are

from Princeton University. He joined the Department of Psychology at the University of British

Columbia in 1972. Professor Suedfeld has authored, edited, and coedited more than 200

scientific articles and numerous books, including Light from the Ashes: Social Science Careers

of Young Holocaust Refugees and Survivors (2001). In his work, Dr. Suedfeld has critically

examined his own history and the history of other child survivors forced at a young age to

choose educational and professional paths in new countries, new languages, and new cultures.

life after the ashes: the postwar pain, and resilience, of young

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